Notes from Underground

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Notes from Underground

Fed up with mass media that's hopelessly out of sync with your worldview? Think you can do better? Do-it-yourself publishing beckons, but where do you start? A guide of some permanence - say, a book - is called for. Yet thanks in part to the Internet, information changes so rapidly that much of it may be out of date by the time you see it in print.

Wired contributing writer Gareth Branwyn set himself a fearsome task when he sat down to write Jamming the Media, his "citizen's guide to reclaiming the tools of communication." Branwyn gamely resolved to compile - in print, mind you - nothing less than a permanent, accurate, and reliable resource for all producers of alternative media (zines, cable-access TV, pirate radio, music, films, video). You find yourself wanting terribly for him to succeed and - given the constraints - so he does.

With Jamming, Branwyn does an admirable job of marshalling the rag-tag resources of the far-flung DIY community into something resembling coherence, and a spot-check finds his sources impressively up to date. And he promises that any revisions will be posted on the Web. Yet reading the book, you're left with one of the worst symptoms of information anxiety: is the data in front of you still current, or should you check it against what's online? The printed word never seemed so fragile.

Branwyn can be naggingly gung-ho when he pays court to his cronies at bOING bOING and his neighbors, who crop up with alarming regularity. However, his lists of alternative efforts do manage to prove there's no accounting for taste. Given the vagaries of DIY publishing, the question is not whether it's too transgressive or subversive or whatever, but whether it's any good - and Branwyn, to his credit, frequently finds fault. He apologizes for the quality of cable-access TV, buries disc-based multimedia (perhaps prematurely), and says that far too much of pirate radio is "basically devoid of content." On the topic du jour, Branwyn writes matter-of-factly - "We're losing what's really special about the Internet: people communicating with each other." A blurb on Jamming's jacket declares, "There's never been a better time to have something to say." The question is, do you have something worth saying?